This is the latest edition of the Movies Fantasy League newsletter. The 2023-2024 season has ended, but you can sign up below to get a reminder for next year’s league. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us. I don’t want to make assumptions; I don’t want to speak in generalities. But it feels safe to broadly infer that if you’re someone who likes our strategy-based movies game enough to register a team and follow along for roughly seven months, you’re probably also someone who likes … charts. Specifically, charts that organize data and trends from the game in ways that I personally find thrilling. If I’ve read the room wrong, my apologies. But if I haven’t — if you’re data-visualization enthusiasts like me — well, hold on to your porkpie hats and keep scrolling. Numbers. They are the lifeblood of the MFL. They’re also crafty little buggers just waiting to screw you up. While sorting our data to prepare the following charts, we discovered an error: We undercounted The Zone of Interest ’s total by 125 points. When those were added back in, the standings changed a bit — though mercifully, our overall winner (as well as the Podcast League and Staff League winners) stayed the same. The new and correct Top Four: Ben Chung: 6,114 points Graham Crackers: 6,097 points Kitty Oppenheimers Drinking Partner: 6,086 points richard feynmans bongos: 6,086 points Kitty held the tiebreaker advantage and thus landed in third place. We’ve been in touch with everyone affected by this tabulation error, extra prizes have been offered, apologies have been extended. Thankfully, everybody who plays the League is deeply cool and has impeccable taste. As noted, our grand champion was unaffected by the scoring adjustment. Congrats again to Ben Chung , who named his squad after himself (how very Paul Brown of you, Ben) and came from behind to claim the lead at the last possible moment. He takes home a Roku TV for his clairvoyance. Ben’s roster was a perfectly constructed lineup of big-ticket items, overperforming mid-tier movies, and a few lottery tickets that paid off. He took the risk of blowing most of his budget on both halves of Barbenheimer — $50 for Oppenheimer , $25 for Barbie — and then used the remaining $25 to bargain hunt. Like so many people, Ben drafted Poor Things ($10) and
American Fiction ($5), picking up on the former’s buzz from Venice and the latter’s buzz out of Toronto. After
Taylor Swift made the last-minute announcement that The Eras Tour would be hitting theaters, Ben bet $5 on the Swifties to show up in numbers. (They did.) With $5 left, he grabbed a pair of buzzy documentaries in Still: The Michael J. Fox Story and eventual Oscar winner 20 Days in Mariupol for $2 apiece, and then with his last dollar, he drafted
Robot Dreams , an under-the-radar animated movie that would go on to earn a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score and pick up a surprise Oscar nomination. Ben was also representing the Filmspotting mini-league, so congratulations to that show and its audience for being able to boast this year’s champion! Behind Ben, the score correction meant that team Graham Crackers (we don’t think this roster was selected by DJ James Kennedy’s dog from Vanderpump Rules but cannot rule it out) jumped into second place and walked away with the Bowers & Wilkins headphones. Tied for third were two teams with identical rosters and names based on Oppenheimer supporting characters: Kitty Oppenheimers Drinking Partner and richard feynmans bongos . That meant the final spot on the podium came down to a tiebreaker, and Kitty Oppenheimer, sloshed though she was, more closely guessed, by the slimmest of margins, how many times “Barbie ” was mentioned during the
Oscars ceremony. (We counted 19.) The rest of the top 12 all received prizes, though team Yo Soy SuficiKENte takes the prize for my favorite team name of the whole season. Well done. Late-season surges by teams with Oppenheimer on their roster was the theme of this season. Little Gold Men podcaster Katey Rich rode those Oppenheimer points to a win among the podcasters. She finished nearly 200 points ahead of yours truly, who crawled into second place, just ahead of Blank Check ’s David Sims. Competition among strangers is one thing, but competition among the parasocial relationships that float into your ear every day? Now that’s special. Shout out to the folks at Cows in the Field , Little Gold Men , Blank Check , Unspooled , Subtitles On , and Eye of the Duck for putting their A-games on display for all to see — and thanks to all the podcasters who participated. Bragging rights will be back up for grabs come this fall. Over in the Vulture staff league, my team, The Owls of GaHuller , rode the Oppenheimer Oscars surge past Rebecca Alter’s Here we go mama squad, which had been leading all season long and seemingly fell into third place on the final day of the season. But then that Zone of Interest scoring adjustment arrived and lifted Rebecca’s team back into second place, just one point behind mine. ONE POINT. Very close behind in third place was Nick Quah’s Boppenheimer squad, which recovered nicely from the early-season crater of Exorcist: Believer . Nate Jones’s 80 for Natey squad finished in fourth, about 100 points ahead of fifth place Alison Willmore. Alison’s lineup boasted five Best Picture nominees, though the fact that none were Oppenheimer doomed her chances. We had 599 mini-leagues of some size or another this season, and since friendly competition is what brings us all together, it’s time we stacked those leagues up against one another. The most populous league, I say with great pride, was the AllOfUsGarys cohort that emerged from the listenership of my own This Had Oscar Buzz podcast; we had 619 Garys turn out. Rounds of applause are similarly due for the Little Gold Men league, Little Goldies (291 teams); the Blank Check league, Blankies (134); the Screen Drafts league (82); and the Filmspotting league (45), each of which had listeners come out in big numbers. AllOfUsGarys averaged 4,428 points across its 619 members, a scant seven points ahead of the 4,421 average that the 291 members of the Little Goldies league posted. In terms of per-team average scores, it was the smaller leagues that really impressed. Haus of Huller , an elite three-person group, averaged a whopping 5,574 points per team. Then there were eight two-team leagues that each averaged greater than 5,000 points per roster. Time to really dig in. The league drafted shortly after the fall festivals in Toronto, Venice, and Telluride had their say, so there was plenty of intel to be had about the year’s awards hopefuls. There was also a fair bit of fool’s gold, but our drafters, by and large, were savvy. Poor Things was an absolute steal at $10, so it’s no surprise that the eventual Oscar winner was the league’s overwhelmingly most popular film, showing up on 4,311 rosters. Similarly, after American Fiction took the People’s Choice prize in
Toronto — one of the most reliable bellwethers for awards-season success — league drafters were all over it at $5, with it showing up on 2,426 rosters. Second to Poor Things on the most-drafted list was Killers of the Flower
moon , which was the more popular of the two priciest options. Killers at $35 seemingly struck more people (3,641) as a smarter bargain than Oppenheimer at $50 (1,585). Similarly, Barbie at $25 was drafted far more often (3,010 times) than Oppy . When Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour was announced during the drafting window and priced at $5, 2,643 drafters flocked to it. Just imagine how many more rosters it would have shown up on if it had been available from the beginning. In the latter half of our top-ten list, we have a few big-time titles — Oppenheimer , obviously, but also Past Lives . All of Us Strangers and Across the Spider-Verse performed admirably, though perhaps disappointingly, particularly Spider-Verse , which cost $15 and didn’t end up winning Best Animated Feature at the Oscars. Last year, eight of the top ten highest scoring movies were also Best Picture nominees. That trend intensified this year with all ten Best Picture nominees doubling as the highest-scoring movies. Maestro being the least-valuable Best Picture nominee dovetails cleanly with the way this season played out. The writing hit the wall pretty early that awards season was going to bend heavily in the direction of Oppenheimer . It was just a matter of time before those points crested. Oppy ended up finishing 800 points ahead of the next highest-scoring movie, which was Poor Things . The next steepest drop-off in points happens between No. 5 Barbie (1,005 points) and No. 6 Anatomy of a Fall (755), but since the latter is very familiar with steep drop-offs, I’m sure that’s exactly how they like it. The highest-scoring non–Best Picture nominees were The Boy and the Heron (410 points), Wonka (397), and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (395). We checked in on the value numbers for these movies several weeks ago , and it’s instructive to see what’s changed since then. Value dollar buys like Robot Dreams and Suzume were at the top of the chart back then. Now that Oscar points have been distributed, some of the season’s heavy hitters have emerged as the best values in the game. By virtue of winning the Oscar for Best Documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol proved to be a fantastic $2 buy. At 165 points per dollar, it takes the prize as the year’s best value. That’s nowhere near the per-dollar value of last year’s champ, All Quiet on the Western Front , which earned 280 points for every dollar spent, but that might mean we’re getting a little better at pricing these movies. American Fiction was the year’s best $5 buy, earning 145 points per dollar. At $10, Poor Things ending up with the second-most points in the league naturally helped its value numbers — in this case, 128.4 points per dollar. That was enough to edge out Robot Dreams (125 ppd) for third place. Certain trends became apparent early in the season, but confirming them with hard numbers was astonishing. Ater a stray comment at Vulture HQ that it looked like Poor Things was on nearly every contending roster, we did some digging — and sure enough, it was on every single roster in the top 100. So, for that matter, was American Fiction . Even crazier: Poor Things was on every single of the top 539 rosters in the league. The best you could do if you didn’t believe in the wonderment of Bella Baxter was 540th place! Two opposite approaches to roster-building are present in Oppenheimer and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour : Oppenheimer had already made its money before the season started but had untold awards potential. The Eras Tour wasn’t going to earn any awards, but that quick-burst box-office was enough to elevate a lot of teams in the late weeks of the fall. An interesting footnote is All of Us Strangers , which started strong in MFL and then hit a wall when the major awards bodies started handing out nominations. It still did well enough to make the top 20 point-earning films for the year, which was good news for 48 of the top 100 rosters. As Yolanda Hadid née Foster (née Hadid) once said: My dream team! This is the best eight-movie roster you could have possibly come up with to maximize point value. This list includes four of the top-seven-scoring movies of the year and then once the budget starts to shrink, it’s all about value picks, like Eras Tour , Mariupol , Still, and Robot Dreams . As was the case last year, the winning MFL team was just one pick away from choosing the perfect squad. If Ben Chung had selected The Holdovers instead of Barbie , he’d have played a perfect game. Ben Chung and Ben Chung alone will have to decide how to grapple with that information. And here you can see which movies had the highest point total as the season went along. Were we ever so young as when we were tracking the box-office results for PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie and Saw X ? Before the year-end awards arrived,
box office was all we had to go on, and the fall season had some peculiar highlights. The meager returns for movies such as The Creator , The Marvels , and Exorcist: Believer meant those animated pups remained the most lucrative movie for most of October. The end of that month saw fall’s two biggest hits in Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and Five Nights at Freddy’s , which stayed as the top points-earning movies through most of November. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was the next hit in theaters, but by that time, the critics awards had begun, and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon pulled into the lead, followed by Barbie and Past Lives . Oppenheimer didn’t pull into the top five until nearly
Christmas, but by the time the
Golden Globes were handed out in early January, the final top five had crystallized: Oppenheimer , Poor Things , The Holdovers , Killers of the Flower Moon , and Barbie . As we close the book on this season’s Movie Fantasy League, we can’t thank you enough for joining the party. We hope you’ll return when things start back up — we started planning this season back in June, so the gears will soon start turning for the 2024-25 campaign. In the meantime, let us know if there are any features you’d like to see added. And remember: the Cinematrix will always be there to scratch your movie-game itch. They won’t all be as hard as today’s , I promise. Questions? Feedback? Can’t find your team or mini-league on the leaderboard? Drop us a line at moviesleague@vulture.com .